34 ASTRONOMY • APRIL 2019
program and the Russians’. We involved
the pilots in the design of things.” By
contrast, the Russian missions relied
much more heavily on automation, with-
out many of the manual backup systems
implemented by NASA to give the astro-
nauts control if the automation failed.
McDivitt says his crew was also included
in the development of the lunar module:
“We were the first guys f lying it, and we
had a lot of input on it,” he recalls.
Testing in orbit
Apollo 9 was the ultimate engineering
test, designed to ensure every piece of the
sophisticated multicomponent Apollo
spacecraft could and would work under
a variety of conditions, including those
that might be unexpected or unwanted.
Confirming that the command and lunar
modules could be docked in space and
operate smoothly, together and apart,
was vital to the success of any attempted
Moon landing.
While in orbit, “we tested everything
there was to test on the lunar module, on
the command module, and the two of
them together,” McDivitt says. “So we
did a lot of things that weren’t done any
time later on, but we did them to make
sure we could do them.”
Those procedures included using the
lunar module as an active docking vehi-
cle, relying on its engine to bring it close
to the command module and connect the
two. “We were trying to show all the
things that we could do. It was fairly dif-
ficult” to use the lunar module in this
way, McDivitt says, “because you have to
look up instead of out the front, and
therefore the reaction of the controlsystems was significantly different com-
pared to what you could see.” Although
the Apollo 9 crew “did it to prove that it
could be done,” in case it ever became
necessary, he says, all subsequent dock-
ings on Apollo missions were done by
the command module.
The lunar module, he says, “f lew the
way it was supposed to.” He wasn’t con-
cerned at all that the fragile, oddly
designed craft — which he had described
in newspaper interviews prior to the mis-
sion as “flimsy” and “a tissue paper
spacecraft” — would work as it should.
“I don’t worry much,” he says.
As commander and lunar module
pilot, respectively, McDivitt and
Schweickart spent several days conduct-
ing extensive tests using the lunar mod-
ule, beginning on the third day of the
mission. Over the next three days, the
craft’s engines were fired several times to
simulate landing on and ascending from
the Moon’s surface. This included the
first crewed throttling of a spacecraft
engine, as McDivitt manually reduced
the engine’s thrust for nearly a full min-
ute before shutting it off in a mock land-
ing burn. On the mission’s fifth day,
McDivitt and Schweickart successfully
separated the lunar module’s two stages
to simulate liftoff from the Moon, as the
craft was designed to leave its landing
stage behind as its launch platform.
Even the two television transmissions
the crew produced, on March 5 and 6,
were part of the engineering test. “It was
in the flight plan that we wanted to check
out the TV camera, make sure it worked
when we got to the Moon,” says McDivitt.Commander: James A. McDivitt
(Gemini IV, Apollo 9)
Lunar module pilot: Russell “Rusty”
L. Schweickart
(Apollo 9)
Command module pilot: David R.
Scott
(Gemini VIII, Apollo 9, Apollo 15)
Command/service module: Callsign
Gumdrop
Lunar module: Callsign Spider
Launched: March 3, 1969, 11:00 A.M. EST
Orbits completed: 151 revolutions
over 10 days, 1 hour, 54 seconds
Orbital altitude:
119 miles (191 km)
To t a l d i s t a n ce t rave l e d :
4,214,543 miles (6,782,649 km)
Landed: March 13, 1969, 12:01 P. M. ESTAPOLLO 9 STATS
In these two images, McDivitt (foreground and
left) and Schweickart train in the Apollo Lunar
Module Mission Simulator at the Kennedy Space
Center, months before the Apollo 9 mission.McDivitt takes a moment to smile for the camera
from within the lunar module during the new
spacecraft’s extensive testing schedule.McDivitt (left) and Schweickart show off the
unique photo compositions possible only in
microgravity conditions in the lunar module.